 |
| The Velvet Note |
About twenty-five miles due north of downtown , a short thirty
minute ride up rte 400, is the Velvet Note possibly the best jazz club in the
Metro Atlanta area. General Manager Tamara Fuller, like many of us a
transplanted New Yorker, started this club almost four years ago with the idea
of creating a club that would appeal to musicians, a place where people could
experience live music in a living room setting with exceptional sound. To that
end she employed an acoustic design engineer to create an atmosphere that
maintains vocal and instrumental fidelity throughout the space. The casual, rug
clad space is curiously located in a renovated retail store in a strip mall
flanked by a Chiropractic office and a Barber Shop. In keeping with the intimate,
living room style there are some small tables, some larger community tables,
some randomly placed chairs and even a comfortable sofa on which to sit and a
rather generous stage that can be seen easily from almost every vantage.
The
venue seats about fifty patrons comfortably and food and drink are available from
a courteous and helpful staff. On this past Saturday evening the Note brought Atanta’s own
Freddy Cole and his quartet in for an evening of story and song. Mr. Cole is a
dapper eighty-four years young and truly one of America’s enduring treasures.
He still commands a subtle baritone whose warmth fills you like the first
sip of a glass of fine cognac. He was joined by his working quartet of Randy
Napoleon on guitar, Elias Bailey on bass and Quentin Baxter on drums. Mr. Cole
is a fine pianist who plays sparingly in the Basie style and who often cites
the Modern Jazz Quartet’s pianist John Lewis as an enduring influence. He actively tours with this group who know
his every move and it is a marvel to witness such organic symbiosis between his
fellow musicians. Mr. Cole is
notoriously known for never pre-arranging his set list preferring to read his
audience and choose his material extemporaneously- keeping his musicians guessing. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the Great
American Songbook and never uses charts.
At this sold out show, Mr. Cole started the first set with a
song from Frank Sinatra’s repertoire “ A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening.” The
medium tempo song got the audience in the right mood and you could see this
band could swing. The second song was a slow ballad “You’re Bringing the
Dreamer Out in Me” and was originally sung
by his brother Nat in 1958 with the arranger Nelson Riddle. Mr. Cole can make any song bristle with
emotion in his most personal conversational way.
 |
| Freddy Cole Singing the Blues |
“Wild is Love” is from a self produced Nat Cole musical
score I’m With You, music by Ray Rasch
and lyrics Dotty Wade, again arranged by
the inimitable Nelson Riddle. The show was supposed to be Nat Cole’s entry onto
Broadway but it never caught on. Bassist Bailey pulses the bossa beat as Mr. Cole sang out the boisterous refrain “Wild is Love.”
The sentiment about a man looking for love among many choices is perfectly believable from the octogenarian whose wizened ways clearly come through in the
telling.
Other highlights of Mr. Cole’s performance “I Loved You” It’s
Crazy,” “Old Folks,”“Something Happens to Me” and “Sometimes I Love You”
The quartet is tight and nimble taking the
lead from Mr. Cole with Mr. Napoleon’s facile guitar work being the principle other lead voice in this
group. Mr. Bailey is steadfast in his rhythmic consistency and Mr. Baxter showed
some subtle brush work on occasion. For the most part this group looks to
their leader for direction and respectfully never upstage him, preferring to allow him the deserved spotlight.
With the holiday just around the corner Mr. Cole treated the
audience to a medley of Christmas songs including a down
home blues titled “Blue Christmas.” What
Christmas would be complete without Freddy Cole singing the heartfelt “Christmas
Song” made famous by his brother Nat. The baritone went into the sentimental “Old Days,
Old Times, Old Friends” and ended the evening ended with the playful“Jingles the
Christmas Cat.”
Mr. Cole will be playing at the St. Regis Hotel in NYC on Dec
21st and then reside at Birdland in New
York City from December 22 through 26th. His latest album is Singing the Blues If you plan to be in New York for the Holidays seeing the romantic crooner live would be the perfect gift for that someone special.
Always glad to read about Freddie. You can't help but wonder why he's not a bigger "star"--the sibling of the great Nat King Cole and a singer doing the American Songbook even before Tony Bennett. Is it because, unlike Nat, he remained a "sit-down" vocalist-pianist, which encourages the public to take his singing less seriously?
ReplyDeleteFrom a "week-end pianist's" perspective, I must say that since the Cloud, the smartphone, and the replacement of discs (LPs or CDs) by "streaming," there's less interest in "live" music and less work for musicians. Jazz saw a brief resurgence 1985-1995, but the easy access to the music and to tracks parted-out willy-nilly in cyberspace eventually squelched the creative efforts of Marsalis and many young artists. The "concept albums" that Sinatra and Riddle put together with the greatest care, ignoring "variety" for the sake of a unified program (a "tone poem") are practically lost on a public that hears only individual "tracks" appearing willy-nilly, liberated from time and space. I think the public will eventually wake up and begin to take music as seriously as you or I (jazz and the American popular song transcend mere "entertainment"--they represent the best achievement of a culture--they qualify as "art" that will endure in spite of the forces of technology). Sinatra and the appearance of the first 33rpm LP were a perfect marriage of art and technology. Now, on the centenary of his birth (Dec. 1915), the bidding wars by the tech giants for rights to stream the works of Taylor Swift (score a win for Apple and its spare billions) portend a flaccid future. But a more hopeful note is sounded by Bob Dylan's recent assessment of the past century's art and its most notable creators. (His short list of cultural heroes--beginning with Irving Berlin and ending with Ole Blue--is one we all would do well to remember. A fertile oasis in the midst of all the noise and the board ops who shape it.